


On taboo themes in fiction

by breathedout



Series: Meta Essays [4]
Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived from havingbeenbreathedout blog, Discussions of underage sexuality, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, discussions of rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 16:30:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16836328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Essay arguing for the artistic importance, and against the censorship, of works dealing with controversial or taboo subject matter. Chapter 1 is the original post; subsequent chapters are later addenda in response to replies.Originally posted to Tumblr on April 15, 2015.The irony of having to archive this particular essay in order to save it from Tumblr's censorship of adults-only content is not lost on me.





	1. Original post

**Author's Note:**

> I'm backing up my fannish essays from Tumblr so as not to lose them if/when the censorship of adult content comes for my blog. Apologies to those getting spammed with years-old meta.

The whole issue of pornographic legitimacy aside:

One of my huge problems with a blanket condemnation of “people who write non-con” or “people who write underage sex,” is the assumption that there’s only one reason that a sexually explicit scene could possibly exist in a piece of fiction: to arouse the reader and uncomplicatedly celebrate whatever sexual activity is taking place. At best, when this mentality does acknowledge the existence of other types of sex scenes, it assumes that the categories “sex scenes that celebrate and arouse” and “sex scenes that problematize and dissect” are mutually exclusive, and that the line between them is clear, easy to draw, and easy to agree upon. 

Say for a moment, that we as a group are going to prohibit the writing and reading of sexually explicit scenes involving rape or underage sexuality. Does the prohibition extend to writing and reading fiction that depicts rape and underage sexuality in order to condemn them or detail trauma around them? If that’s allowed, does it apply to writing and reading fiction that deals with those themes in order to explore the complexities of individual responses to them? What if those responses are themselves morally dubious? If that’s allowed, does the prohibition kick in if any of the characters experiences arousal? If the reader does? Or does it just kick in when the reader perceives that a character is aroused _at a point when, according to the reader, they shouldn’t be_? Or when the reader senses, through a hundred intangible narrative cues, that the writer’s attitude toward the events in the story aren’t the same as the reader’s?

If you feel that the location of this line is obvious, are you sure that your boundary is the objectively correct one? Because historically, there is a VERY STRONG PRECEDENT that once censorship/taboos around these issues gain a toehold, people will disagree about the location of that line; that they will in fact challenge and attempt to ban any book which includes the issues in question, regardless of whether it does so to glorify them, condemn them, or something more complicated. If you would take issue with any of the following calls to ban or remove books from libraries, perhaps the line is not so clear-cut as you believed. Take the following examples:

  * **Maya Angelou’s _I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings_ :** challenged frequently for its depiction of underage rape. The book is autobiographical and Angelou condemns her rape in no uncertain terms, while also telling the story of her difficult path to survival and autonomy. Is this inappropriate material that should be kept from minors and rape survivors? Many people think so.
  * **Ralph Ellison’s _Invisible Man_** : challenged on the basis of portraying a rape, and also for including a lot of violence. Given that it engages heavily with themes of anti-black racism in the American South in the 1920s through 1950s, it’s hard to imagine how this novel would work without the brutality enacted on the narrator and his subsequent compulsion to reenact it on the bodies of other people. That is one of the key points Ellison is trying to make. That said, I think the book is also pretty misogynist, and downplays the seriousness of the rape. Does that mean its racial insights should be shelved and the novel banned? Or, alternately, does the brutal anti-black violence in it offend our (lbr, white) sensibilities to the extent that we should avoid it? Many people think so.
  * Basically **Judy Blume** ’s entire back catalog, usually challenged for underage sexuality including masturbation and sex between teens. Blume was an adult when she wrote all these books, and treats teen sexuality fairly explicitly and as a normal part of development. Is that inherently “problematic”? Is it problematic that I, reading Forever at age 11, got turned on by it? Many people think so.
  * **_The Diary of Anne Frank_** , challenged (and, incidentally, expurgated pre-publication) for underage sexuality and bisexuality. Note that this is not fiction but is the actual, real-life sexuality of Anne Frank, who was actually a young teenager when she wrote this diary for her own eyes. Is it objectionable that she was (sometimes less than whole-heartedly) engaging in sexual experimentation while coming of age locked in an attic hiding from the Nazis? Is it offensive that some of her sexual thoughts were directed toward girls? Many people think so.
  * **Dorothy Allison’s _Bastard Out of Carolina_** , challenged frequently for depicting repeated child rape. This novel is also heavily autobiographical, and in it Bone struggles with huge amounts of guilt for feeling aroused when she fantasizes about her own abuse while masturbating. Those scenes are very uncomfortable. They are meant to be uncomfortable. Does that mean we should expunge them from our public libraries? Many people think so.



  
(Here’s my source for the above examples. [NB: the original link is broken.])

Lest folks twist my words, let me just say: I am not arguing that your average piece of fandom pornography is on a par with the subtlety of Angelou and Allison. The vast majority of published fiction isn’t, either. But one problem with calls to across-the-board, topical censorship–whether it be self-censorship or community censorship or government censorship–is that **_even if one accepts the premise that writing these specific kinds of pornography to get off is inherently wrong_ (which I, for the record, do not), the prohibition does not take into account gradations of intent, thoughtfulness, and execution. **

It _cannot_ do so. Reader response is inherently subjective. One person’s garbage is another person’s life-changing treasure, sometimes for reasons totally unforeseen by the author. So here are my three visceral responses to the current hullabaloo, at least insofar as the issues are even what’s being debated:

1) I can’t and won’t trust anyone else to make decisions for me about what constitutes “acceptable fiction,” especially not based on some checklist of themes the story may or may not contain. Certainly tags and warnings should be used to the best of peoples’ ability, but ultimately that is a decision I as a reader and writer get to–indeed have to–make for myself.

2) IMO this discussion could be more productive if we as fans openly critiqued the political dimensions of one another’s work, so that the conversation could move from “writing about non-con is wrong” to “here are specific issues with the way that this story in particular depicts non-con.” I doubt this is ever going to happen, however.

3) **It is patently absurd to argue that everyone who writes any kind of publicly-available fiction should only ever write fiction that is suitable for children.** None of my fiction is suitable for children, even when it doesn’t involve sex. Allison is also unsuitable for children. Much of Shakespeare is unsuitable for children. Yes, children can seek out inappropriate things on the internet, much like when I was underage I snuck volumes of lesbian erotica off the shelves at Powell’s and sex manuals off the shelves at my public library. But that doesn’t remotely equate to a moral mandate that I, an adult, who have experienced sexual darkness and confusion and despair and am left with sexual-relational questions I legitimately do not have answers to, and who am attempting (perhaps in fellowship with other adults who are facing the same kinds of quandaries) to use art to make sense of all that before I die, should abstain from working through those experiences in a fictional context because of the possibility that a child might go against my specifically-stated wishes and read them. 

I mean look. I _am_ doing my best to be in the world in a moral way. This is how I do that. I firmly believe that _doing the work_ of that sometimes involves confronting inner darkness, even inner monstrosity; that it involves confronting the inevitability of fucking up really really badly from time to time, and then dealing as best one can with the aftermath of those fuckups. Sometimes atonement isn’t possible. Sometimes there are elements of pleasure or thrill in the process of fucking up. I think fiction can and should grapple with that. I don’t believe that we become better people by pretending that the world is as simple as the picture my parents painted for me when I was five.


	2. Response to shsl-cake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to shsl-cake's reply to the original post.

> **shsl-cake said:** lol ur acting as if that’s why the people we complain about write those scenes tho. it’s blatantly obvious when it’s for a good cause, the ones we condemn write that shit bc they think it’s “kinky” and “edgy.”

The entire point of this post is that both I and history strongly disagree that it’s “blatantly obvious” when controversial content is artistically justified. Historically that has been anything but obvious to society at large, which I why I cited all those examples of books that most reasonable people would consider artistically and politically unimpeachable, but which plenty of folks still want to ban. The power of censorship isn’t a cat you can put back in its bag once it’s clawed your particular enemy. 

Also, the metric for critique really should not be authorial intent. Who cares what the author thought when they were writing something, or whether they wrote the thing “for a good cause”? Fandom discourse is far too fixated on scrutinizing the traumas and guessing at the intentions of writers in an effort to determine whether they’re allowed to write a given thing. Forget about the author. **The metric should be _whether the created object, in its context and totality, reinforces oppression._** And it should be a metric for two-way CRITIQUE, not blanket censorship, for heaven’s sake!

From my previous examples: for my money, Ralph Ellison’s _Invisible Man_ is misogynist in both its treatment of rape and its essentializing of its female characters. This may or may not have been an intentional or socially-minded decision on Ellison’s part, but regardless, I would argue that it does not serve the narrative as a whole, and that that aspect of the book perpetrates gender-based oppression. Other aspects of the book combat race-based oppression, and do so extremely eloquently and effectively. It’s also just a corker of an absorbing read. None of these things negates the others. We should neither ban the book, nor remain silent about its misogyny because of its seminal anti-racism work and its powerhouse prose. We should critique the ways in which it fails while also acknowledging the many ways in which it succeeds. We should read it and have a conversation about it! 

Or, another example: I think Ayn Rand’s _The Fountainhead_ is rapey, politically poisonous, and poorly written. It perpetrates gender-based oppression and class-based oppression, and generally inhibits empathy. But its philosophy apparently resonates with a huge group of people. I think we as a society need to take a compassionate and non-shaming look at why that might be—and as a tool in that discussion, we need the book. Banning it would only drive Rand sympathizers underground, inhibit discussion since nobody is supposed to be reading it, make The Fountainhead more desirable for its forbidden status, and frankly accord it more social importance than it deserves. 

From a 2006 decision by Sonia Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court justice:

> For purposes of evaluating artistic or cultural merit, the term “pornography” is notoriously elusive. In that context, determining whether material deserves the label of pornography is a subjective, standardless process, heavily influenced by the individual, social,and cultural experience of the person making the determination. 

The same holds true for any sub-set of written pornography that might be deemed beyond the pale. The discussion itself can be useful, but not if it deteriorates into two polarized sides screaming threats at each other over the contents of a blanket checklist of fictional no-nos. 


	3. Response to latining

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Related response to latining. 
> 
> (Were I writing this now I would have more examples of Canadian censorship: for example, the Little Sisters Bookstore case in 1994. But I'm avoiding editing these except to add bracketed notices of broken links.)

> **latining said** : The question posed to Canadian courts is “does the work have artistic/historical merit”. You can argue about how well something is executed, but there’s a pretty clear line between a work intended to explore flawed people and ball-slapping snarry porn.  
>    
>  And also? You can write whatever you want (that isn’t illegal), but you’re not entitled to praise, kudos, or immunity from criticism for what you write. Most of the wank I see is from underage-writing authors salty that they don’t get a seat at the table and that people don’t want to be associated with them. Yes. That is what happens when you decide something morally and socially abhorrent is your hill to die on. People don’t want to be associated, online or off, with people who write child porn. Fucking amazing.  
>    
>  As far as free speech arguments go, if your best argument is that underage sex isn’t literally illegal to write… man, do a lot of countries have bad news for you.

Granted I am more educated on American history than Canadian history, but it seems to me that Canadian courts, like all courts who face these issues, struggle to strike a balance on judgment calls which are far from “pretty clear.” When the Ontario film board [banned the film adaptation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Canada#Movies) of Günter Grass’s award-winning anti-fascist novel _The Tin Drum_ in 1980, I am willing to bet that was not a decision based on “clear” lack of artistic and historical merit. During the spate of critiques by journalists and civil libertarians leading up to the [2013 repeal of Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Human_Rights_Commission_free_speech_controversy#Criticism_from_civil_libertarians.2C_2008) (legislation that banned any speech “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt,” even if said speech was demonstrably true), the very scope of the debate demonstrates that the issues were similarly murky. Was the legislation being used to silence genuine hatemongers? Yes. Was it also being used to quash legitimate political dissent? Yes. Was it, what’s more, impossible to enforce equitably because only people with time and resources to hire a lawyer and bring a complaint (people, in other words, who had access to the systems of power) could get their cases heard? Yes again. 

People keep responding to this post in this dismissive way, as if I am being nit-picky or hysterical for fearing the wide reach and chilling effect of censorship. I am not being hysterical. I am not being nit-picky. I and others have demonstrated over and over, with specific examples and factual citations, instances where censorship—even the best-intentioned censorship—gets subverted into abuse. It happened in the [LJ Strikethrough debacle of 2007](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough). It happened in Canada in and before 2013. It’s happened continuously in American schools over the past 50+ years. It happened from 1873 until (in some cases) the mid-1960s, a period during which the so-called [Comstock anti-vice laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws) were used to restrict access to everything from diaphragms to James Joyce’s _Ulysses_. It happens to a particularly egregious degree during times of war (see for example: the 1798 US [Alien and Sedition Acts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts) and 1918 [Sedition Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918)) and under fascist-leaning governments—both of which make me extra vigilant given the recent American election as well as the rise of the far-right across Europe. 

I’m sorry to sound frustrated, I just… I don’t know how to be clearer about the fact that this is not a laughable or theoretical worry. When one argues that the difference between Art and Porn, or Acceptable Porn and Unacceptable Porn, is inherently “blatantly obvious” or even “pretty clear,” and that this time things will be different because one only wants to censor the bad stuff, that is literally the same exact argument that has been made by censors since the dawn of censorship—and many if not most of those episodes of censorship went on to be oppressive. The argument also takes for granted that once the mechanism of censorship goes into effect, one’s original intentions will continue to be respected. This, despite a global political landscape that is currently in the midst of a radical right-ward shift. 

I have two other concerns:

  1. Did you read through this entire thread and see its strongest argument as “writing underage sex is not illegal”? Because, man, I… well, I see many much more substantive arguments going on here, and many concrete examples of pieces of literature that have come under attack for their morality but which were also artistically and politically revolutionary to many people.
  2. Obviously nobody is entitled to kudos, praise, or immunity from criticism, regardless of what they write. But I am curious what you mean by writers of underage sex “not getting a seat at the table.” What is this table? If you mean “AO3 should modify its policy on warnings and tagging,” I’m all ears. If we’re talking about “my clique doesn’t want to be friends with your clique,” I couldn’t give a shit. If that’s code for “my clique gains access to the systems of power and unilaterally decides that your clique’s work gets deleted off the internet,” I give a lot of them. 



(I assume, btw, that by “underage-writing authors” you mean “authors of writing that sexually objectifies children,” rather than “authors of writing exploring the subjective experience of childhood sexuality.” Although again: based on stories like the one outlined above by @tyrannosaurus-trainwreck, I don’t see how we can argue that that line is clear, let alone located in the same place for all readers.)


	4. Response to spacesocialist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to a reply to a related post by spacesocialist.

> **spacesocialist said:** first of all no one is actually censoring ao3 second of all a high school banning the bluest eye isn’t the same thing as someone on the damn internet being uncomfortable with underage rape porn and this literally could not be more intellectually dishonest if it tried thanks 

  
  


Let’s break this down.

> first of all no one is actually censoring ao3

When posts like this one [NB: blog deleted] criticize ao3′s “policy of not deleting horrible works,” I am at a loss to see what else is being advocated besides censorship. The only alternative to “not deleting horrible works” is “deleting horrible works,” which requires AO3 to set themselves up as arbiters of what is and is not suitable for publication on the internet. Obviously no one is actually censoring AO3 _right now_ , which is exactly my point: that’s how I want things to continue. Because, however clear I might find my personal line between “horrible works” and “works which are not horrible,” it’s 100% guaranteed that some other reasonable people, somewhere, sometime, will disagree with me.

> second of all a high school banning the bluest eye isn’t the same thing as someone on the damn internet being uncomfortable with underage rape porn

Firstly, see above: what we’re talking about is not just “being uncomfortable with” certain material but advocating the wholesale deletion of said material. That’s a huge and important distinction.

Secondly, how is it qualitatively different? _The Bluest Eye_ is about a child who gets raped. Is it different because you don’t find the rape scene in Morrison’s novel arousing, or the rapist sympathetic? If so, can you vouch that no reader could find it arousing? (The line gets even fuzzier with novels like Dorothy Allison’s _Bastard out of Carolina_ , where the narrator engages in a confused, guilt-ridden and wounded way with the feelings of arousal she _does_ experience when she thinks about her abuse.) And what about the fact that Morrison has said she intended to cultivate empathy in the reader for the rapist character? Is that not “problematic”? If _you_ don’t find it problematic, can you vouch that no one on the hypothetical AO3 board or in the pro-deletion camp would find it so? Because based on the lack of subtlety in a lot of this discourse, I am pretty sure a sizable chunk of folks would. 

Is the example different because one forum is a high school and the other is the internet? But in that case, it seems to me that the high school has, if anything, a stronger justification for censorship. They are _requiring_ students to read books that are on their reading lists. A student who is traumatized by reading _The Bluest Eye_ has little recourse: if they stop reading, their grade will suffer. By contrast, no one has ever been required to read a piece of fanfiction on AO3, and everyone is always free to stop reading any fanfic they’ve started. There will never be a test; there will never be a grade. And there are warning tags, right up front, which, while not foolproof or universally adopted, do make it relatively easy to steer clear of material you don’t want to engage with. Unlike, say, going to a movie or turning on the TV, where you are likely to see untagged or warned-for rape scenes and rape jokes right, left, and center.

Or is the case different simply because Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize winner, and random-ao3-user779 is a nobody? But Morrison was a nobody once, too. 

Look, I personally strongly dislike stories that eroticize rape, too—especially if I get the feeling that the writer is confusing rape with sex, or force with passion, or is otherwise not _conscious_ of the lack of consent they’re depicting. **I think that’s a TOTALLY legit thing to feel uncomfortable with.** Here are some ways I would advocate expressing that discomfort, all of which I personally do and have done:

  * Writing and reblogging meta that deconstructs certain common, rape-glorifying tropes. I’ve seen this a lot already around Twilight and Fifty Shades: detailed breakdowns of exactly what, in those novels, is so unhealthy about not only the relationships depicted, but the authorial attitude toward those relationships.
  * Writing and reblogging meta that validates the decision to avoid all rape scenes if that’s the place a reader has come to.
  * Writing and reblogging meta that respectfully encourages fanfic writers to tag and warn as thoroughly as possible.
  * Including rape warnings in any relevant fic recs or media reviews one writes, with the understanding that some objectively “good” stories involve rape and that even if that’s the case it is still something reasonable people may want to avoid. 
  * In said fic recs or media reviews, also including thoughtful analysis about why you, the reviewer, felt the rape scene was either a compassionate and necessary treatment, or gratuitous/poorly done/romanticized.
  * Engaging in debate about specific fictional treatments of rape, in order to hone critical thinking skills around how fiction works and doesn’t work, how to analyze a writerly stance, and what a given reader is okay with reading versus not okay with reading. This kind of debate is also good because it illuminates the fact that not everyone will agree about what constitutes a responsible or realistic treatment. There will be outliers at either side of the spectrum: stories about which most people will agree that they’re either Good Art or Irresponsible Garbage, and then a squishy middle where reasonable people will disagree. Which I think is a great thing to be able to observe in action. 



  
All of this is great. Critique is great. But there’s a big old difference between saying “I am uncomfortable with how many eroticized depictions of rape I see in fandom, and I think we as a group should have a critical conversation about it and help folks who don’t want to see it, avoid it” and saying “the platform AO3 should make unilateral decisions about which stories to delete off their servers for inappropriate content.” The latter of which is, pretty clearly, what the linked post was advocating.


End file.
